Dreams: Fiction or Prediction?

I'm feeling philisophical and i'm currently deep in thought....so i began thinking of this...

Have you ever wondered whether or not our dreams or nightmares have logical explainations, or whether they're just simple stories made up in our minds?
Most of us have experienced the state of "Deja-vu" right? Have we actually "been there before", or was it apart of some dream that we havent remembered until that situation triggered something in our mind?
Scientists have tried to explain that "Deja-vu" is simply something in our mind that is triggered to make us think that we have been in that situation before, but what would be the purpose of that? especially if that situation is completely insignificant in our life.
I've had dreams, some insignificant and some quite significant, that have come to reality and come true. I'm not saying that i'm a millionare with a huge mansion, but there's a few things that i have thought about, and dreamed about, and it's happened. Almost like Deja-vu.

What do you think about our minds? can our human minds make accurate predictions, or are they simple predictions using the past and present events in our lives to make a reasonable assumption of what the future holds? Is the future predictable? and what do you think the whole "Deja-vu" thing is all about?

feel free on comments/explainations , etc.

I think dreams are just another case of something humans understand initially so we made up a larger meaning for it than there actually is. In my opinion, people who say they dreamt something happen before it happened see it that way because they want. Similar to how we see faces in clouds or what have you. :jess:

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Originally Posted by LunarWeaver

I think dreams are just another case of something humans understand initially so we made up a larger meaning for it than there actually is. In my opinion, people who say they dreamt something happen before it happened see it that way because they want. Similar to how we see faces in clouds or what have you. :jess:

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Yes. One of the many types of small-scale apophenia that humans experience.

I predict that an EOFF member will post after me. :bigsmile:

I really didn't want to be the one fulfilling Christmas' prediction :(.

Anyway, Of course it is possible that something you dream of will happen, but think of all the thousands of dreams that don't happen! On top on that, humans like altering dreams a bit as they experience something similar.

i know that there are millions of dreams that you dont remember and dont come true, mainly because some are so far from the truth or so far from reality that it would be impossible.

i do see that dreams can be seen as predictions because we want them to, but i am talking of the ones that are almost identical in situation. I'm not talking about anything deadly significant, but the silly little things that occur in a dream, and then happen within the next day or so...

Yeah I don't think dreams are predictions. And they had better not be I swear to God. Otherwise I'm going to be like eaten by sharks and having spiders crawling all over me and not being able to walk like a normal human being and that would just be bad.

Some believe that your sub-concious pieces things together and calculates what will happen next, so if it DOES happen it may seem familiar.

yeah, i've just read a report where "Deja-vu" has been re-created in a lab with 24 different people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5194382.stm

they say that its 2 parts of the mind that recognise different things, and if the two parts recognise something familiar at once, then it may seem as if you have witnessed the event before...

I think dreams are more of a way of our subconscious to tell us something. Most likely something we either realize but do not admit it to ourselves, or that we are unaware of at a superficial level. I have had dreams that I have remembered that were related to situations in my life at that time.

That said, I do not think all dreams have meaning, though some do. I tend only to remember dreams that evoke strong emotions, usually nightmares. Most of the time they have meaning, sometimes they do not.

As for precognitive dreams, I cannot say. I am somewhat torn with the idea that we can predict the future. I do believe that certain events are meant to happen but not everything.

I have had déja-vu before, various of times, not of late though.

Albert Einstein was born with the Sun in Pisces, the most romantic, imaginative and dreamy sign of the zodiac. Legend has it that Einstein's Theory of Relativity was prompted by a dream. Scientists today are still puzzled at how he managed to arrive at the notion of Relativity. It was inspiration, the muses of sleep and dreams, the ability to shift and dissolve boundaries and to tap into the infinite and collective unifying knowledge. All of these are the special province of Pisces.

I've had many deja vus, and they always seem to happen on hot summer days. I've always been of the impression that they were "short circuits" in the brain, and never thought of them as very important.

well its just a fiction..a dream is like what your thinking of in your sleep...

Relativity was not really "news", Einstein himself said he created that by "standing on the shoulders of giants" like Newton, Maxwell and others who came before him. His real breakthrough work came after, with the Special Relativity work. He almost created a whole new branch of mathematics just to explain the physics of it. Perhaps that is the dream of which you speak of ?

I've heard that dreams are what we see from our subconscious work in processing the facts and emotions we ran through the day. So in this sense, we could never see the future on them. Yet we do. Curious thing the human mind!

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Originally Posted by Shadow Bahamut

I've had dreams, some insignificant and some quite significant, that have come to reality and come true. I'm not saying that i'm a millionare with a huge mansion, but there's a few things that i have thought about, and dreamed about, and it's happened. Almost like Deja-vu.

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Given that people are thinking all the time, and dream many dreams every single night, chances are that some will turn out true due to random chance. If on the other hand every single dream (or a significantly large number of dreams) you dreamed turned out to be demonstrably true the next day, then it might mean something. I'd bet this is not the case.

If someone has a dream that they are in a car accident and then the next day it happens then it is strange.

Some people here seem to like only controllable knowledge. i.e. stuff that is repeatable.

Dreams are a higher reality than this, however.


Cheers.

Not prediction...neither fiction.

I agree with the psychology's point of view.

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Originally Posted by The Summoner of Leviathan

I think dreams are more of a way of our subconscious to tell us something. Most likely something we either realize but do not admit it to ourselves, or that we are unaware of at a superficial level. I have had dreams that I have remembered that were related to situations in my life at that time.

That said, I do not think all dreams have meaning, though some do. I tend only to remember dreams that evoke strong emotions, usually nightmares. Most of the time they have meaning, sometimes they do not.

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Dreams is what we have "inside" of us but it doesn't have to be what we are afraid to admit.
It's difficult to know what dreams "mean" but I don't believe they are a kind of prediction; I believe they are our thoughts and feelings, in a "codified" way.
The thing is, as Freud said, in our day life, we have the "repression process" , (if I am spelling it right in English), we have social rules that we keep learning and saving it inside of us, so we can't express ourselves to the limit, even if we wanted it...there are some things that aren't just aceptted by society.

But in our dreams, that process is in a less scale, and we "let it out" feelings that we can't understand or are afraid to admit, or anything related to fears or desires/wishes. This is our subconscious working.
Unfourtunately, not all dreams are that easy to "translate"... Sometimes, they are given us as symbols - like I said the process of repression is less but it's still here.

Well...

after all:

There's nothing "new" about dreams , at least, it wasn't proven yet.

It's just a mixture of feelings, fears, wishes and desires, that live in our mind.

Some people say that Deja Vu is when all of the deminsions you are currently in meet up and do the same thing, and all your consiciousness meeting up in the same spot makes the Deja Vu happen. Other people say you're repeating something you did in a past life. Sometimes people dream of a simular situation and remember it. Some doctor's say Deja Vu is accured because your brain kind of shuts off for less than a milisecond and when it's back on you remember doing what ever you were doing, because you were just doing it a second ago.

I remember most of all of my dreams, which is a good thing 'cause they tend to show me how my day is going to be or show me bluntly what my problems are. I'm a very pro-believer in dream interpretation and such.

Dreams are like a movie written by your subconcious left to your conciousness to interpret. You may have a dream about a purple dog with a flower in it's mouth, something you may consider a funny dream, but when you interpret how you may know this purple dog with a flower in it's mouth, you may realize that you have a family friend who's birthday was last week and you saw her in a shirt with a purple dog with a flower in it's mouth. But you may -never- realize that connection. Dreams are the closest way a person can ever know themselves.

If the person is clairvoiyant they may be able to see peices of the future, it might also be peices from different dreams that come together to reach what happens, 'causing Deja vu, you remember doing this before, but it may be a cause of several dreams telling you it instead of one telling you the future point blank.

If you can remember your dreams (I can! :D) then get a book and write them all down, if you buy one of those dream dictionaries, you should first interpret it yourself, and then think of the thing that stands out the most, then you would look for that thing in a dream dictionary or something of your choice. The strongest memory from a dream is normally the one that wants to tell you something, but if you remember alot of things write them all down.
Who knows, what you right down might come around and happen tomorrow. :)

their always an interesting topic to discuss but its really all thoughts and often subconscious thoughts.

dreams are wierd though but their nothing supernatural even though they often seem it.

they usually have some sort of meaning though and you can find out why you had most dreams.

Since we don't know exactly how the brain operates the purpose of dreams can only be guessed at. While it's easy to measure the physical changes in the body during a dream (see: REM) the mind, the part that actually experiences the dream and can report on it, cannot be. It's interesting that during sleep, when the concious mind is supposedly switched off to an extent, that we are still able to remember these dreams. Some theories suggest that dreams have something to do with our learning, that by associating events, people, places, object etc. in seemingly random situations we can become more strongly attached to them by creating stronger links in our minds.

The actual interpretations of dreams by so-called "dream experts" is tenuous at best. Many objects that may not appear in everyone's dreams (for example seeing a car crash or a plane flying overhead) cannot be attributed to some people that may not encounter these things. Are we to believe that tribes in the rainforest dream about John Madden unicycling down the motorway? It goes along the same lines as tarot card reading and psychic predicitions : a series of vague statements and fishing questions to discern some semblance of higher knowledge.

What is interesting is that some people experience dreams in different ways to others. There seems to be no real link between mental ability and the frequency of dreams. Even more interesting is how people can consiously manipulate their dreams (commonly known as lucid dreaming) while others either cannot remember their dreams or sometimes believe that something is happening in the dream in real life. For something that apparently aids us for some reason (and evolutionary speaking if we all experience it then it is a part of our genetics that has hung on for an advantageous reason) it's wholly inconsistent in it's execution.

I had a dream about Hitler last night.

I cheered him up because everyone hated him, got his autograph (Not because I actually wanted it, but for $$$), and then pulled of a family member who tried to throttle him.

... I sincerely hope dreams are nothing other than random brain workings. :/

I either have dreams that mean something to me or dreams that are only 'caused because I watch to much TV or play to many games.

I was once on an episode of House and I gave the entire hospital some kind of disease. He save me~ :D

my dreams are seepage of random ideas, thoughts, and experiences i've had in a day...maybe coupled with some inner demons and desires...that's it

I had a dream once where I was told my a lamb with sores on it's face that one day the virtuous people of the world would bow to me.

Luckily it's just a dream...right?

Im all for the astral plane idea and how we have a second persona that we only can control during dreams. Oh one thing that I thought up that most people have thought was deep. "Have you ever thouht the nights where we don't dream are just dreams of darkness"

My bf swears that he dreams the future but he doesn't remember those dreams until they happen, and then he recalls that he dreamt this or whatever o_O;; Confuses me xD He's not really the type to lie about it but I don't think that it's true either, just his mind confusing himself ^^ I don't believe in dreaming the future.

Dreams are very important, an if looked at appropriately, can tell you your future. People would do well to pay them more attention. We need dreams to maintain a healthy mind, so dreams serve a very important purpose. Dreams are necessary. Why would we need them, if they were mere stories?

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Scientists have tried to explain that "Deja-vu" is simply something in our mind that is triggered to make us think that we have been in that situation before, but what would be the purpose of that? especially if that situation is completely insignificant in our life.

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That theory also doesn't have any explanation as to how people can have knowledge of a place or situation etc, that by scientific standards, they shouldn't have.

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Originally Posted by Jebus

I had a dream once where I was told my a lamb with sores on it's face that one day the virtuous people of the world would bow to me.

Luckily it's just a dream...right?

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How awfully biblical. Then again I'd bow to you anyday Jeebs :jokey:

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Originally Posted by Christmas

I predict that an EOFF member will post after me. :bigsmile:

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Wow. You're good.

I had a dream back when I was eight or so (yes I can remember a dream I had that long ago!) that the whole school turned into vampires, and when they turned on the water taps blood came out instead.

If that's prediction, I have a feeling I'll stay away from that school for a while.